Archive for October, 2015

Revenge killing: Mental patient stabs to death psychiatrist who had him committed

A gruesome killing occurred in the early hours of October 14 when 21-year-old Christopher Frick snuck into the home of a psychiatrist who may have had him committed years earlier before stabbing her to death.

Dr. Caroline Ekong, who celebrated her one-year wedding anniversary last month, was an Attending Psychiatrist at Rockford Center, a 118-bed mental health facility located in Newark, Delaware when she tragically had her life cut short.

Despite the fact that they had not spoken for three years leading up the crime, Frick reportedly grew obsessed with Ekong, 55, after she allegedly had him committed to Rockford Center when he was 18 years old.

The News Journalreported that “Frick wrote about his involuntary commitment to Rockford in an August 2014 letter” addressed to the editor at the Wilmington-based newspaper.

“The staff framed me as suicidal, as well as everyone else I saw the night I was ‘evaluated.’ The commonplace involuntary commitment at Rockford Center is prominent because it is owned by the for-profit company Universal Health Services,” wrote Frick.

21-year-old killer complained about psychiatrist in Google Reviews

Last year, Frick also posted a Google Review of Rockford Center in which he specifically named Dr. Ekong as the woman responsible for having him locked up. “The person who imprisoned me was Caroline Ekong, whose ego is so large that she would never be able to admit doing something wrong,” says the Review. …

A week after Oklahoma called off an execution due to a drug mix-up, an autopsy report has revealed it used the same incorrect drug in a previous execution in January.

Oklahoma Department of Corrections, which has been under intense scrutiny since it botched an execution last year, called off the planned execution of Richard Glossip last week after discovering that it had received potassium acetate, and not potassium chloride, as its procedures require. ….

Jailed for Life for Minor Crimes: The UK’s Forgotten Prisoners

In a three-month investigation, VICE News uses Freedom of Information laws, exclusive interviews, and prison reports to uncover the scandal of the 4,612 prisoners serving life sentences under abolished legislation — some for relatively minor crimes.From 2005, judges in England and Wales started giving out a new kind of life sentence for offenses such as shoplifting, minor criminal damage, and affray (fighting in public).Indeterminate Sentences for Public Protection (IPPs) were found to breach the European Convention on Human Rights, and the government scrapped the sentence in 2012. But nobody did anything about the prisoners already inside.

Three-quarters of them have completed their mandatory minimum sentence, but still have no release date, at a cost to the taxpayer of $180 million a year. Sixteen inmates have killed themselves since the sentence’s abolition.

The very concept of mental illness remains a fraught subject for discourse, both for those to whom the term is applied and for those making the application.

Historically, stigmatizing labels have often been used to punish, banish, and even kill and used to incite mob violence. Just as a weed is a plant out of place, to quote my favorite college prof, so many of today’s mentally ill may be people who would fit comfortably into now-vanished societal niches where they wouldn’t be considered other than normal. And in the inverse conditions, men and women who once were considered sexual deviants and now joining the societal mainstream and are courted by advertisers.